Since I last wrote, we've had some up's and down's. We were really pleased that over the course of the 10 days or so we gave developers to bid on the work, we received interest from around 20 different developers. Some were individuals, but most were small companies - mainly located in either India or Eastern Europe. Almost all of the developers have an associated rating based on feedback from past projects they have completed - similar to the way eBay gives sellers ratings.

We began assessing the developers based on their rating, our assessment of the work examples they provided, the price they quoted, and their apparent English comprehension skill based on our email and messenger exchanges.

At the end of the process we selected a firm based in India and then agreed on some interim deliverables and a payment schedule. (We pay the full amount upfront to Rentacoder but this is put into escrow and released as set milestones are achieved.) Our contact asked a few questions about the specification but like most of the others, he mentioned that it was extremely comprehensive.

A few days after work had begun, we were sent a draft of the first couple of pages. It was diabolical! We were really disappointed to find that they hadn't followed the architecture or many of the design instructions that we'd spelt out. For the techies out there, some examples of this were that we'd stated that HTML tables should not be used and that all styles be defined in separate CSS files, but were dismayed to find the pages full of tables and inline styles. There were many more problems as well.

After discussing this we communicated the problems to the developers and stated that they should stop any further development until we were happy that they could actually develop in the style we'd specified. They agreed and appeared to understand our concerns. However, after a few more days, they sent through the same pages that they'd now reworked. There were some marginal improvements but it was very clear now that this company was not going to be able to develop to the standards we had in mind. We therefore decided to cancel our agreement with the developer.